There's never been a better time to be a laptop gamer. Slimmer designs paired with more powerful processors and graphics cards have brought gaming laptops closer than ever to performance previously found only in desktops.
Laptops can now easily support high-end virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and new designs can fit top-tier graphics hardware into wafer-thin laptop bodies.
For this roundup, we've taken all the laptops with discrete graphics hardware we've tested over the past two years and ranked them based on 3D performance. These are the top performers from that group.
When reviewing a gaming laptop or desktop, we run preset tests using several games, including Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Bioshock Infinite and others, along with standard benchmarks like 3DMark, which is designed to test a computer's 3D graphic rendering capabilities.
For this list, we're ranking the laptops in descending order of 3DMark scores, but the real-world game scores (presented as the number of frames of animation per second the laptop can render) match very closely. Note that these scores are specifically for the exact configurations of each laptop we tested, and almost all can be configured with a wide range of options.
The handful of laptops with dual video cards (rare in a laptop) came out on top, followed by laptops with a single Nvidia 1080 GPU and so on down the list. The no. 1 spot is held by the most expensive laptop we've ever reviewed, the $9,000 Acer Predator 21 X. But at more reasonable prices, systems from Asus, Alienware, Origin PC, Lenovo, HP, MSI and Razer, among others, are all represented.
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